Fourteen months. Eighteen hours of executive time. A 42-point swing in whether frontline staff actually trusted their own database. That's what a nonprofit CRM rollout looks like when it's built around people instead of software.
Kuhu Saha, Executive Director of Give Merit, had already sat through one polished Salesforce pitch when she said no. It wasn't the price. It was the silence around everything that mattered: her organization, her people, the two previous database attempts that had left her team quietly distrustful of new systems altogether. She didn't want, in her words, a Ferrari nobody could drive.
That instinct led her to Ascendably, and to a framework called the Human Stack™, which measures whether the humans around a system are actually ready to use it. Give Merit's starting numbers told an honest story: solid technology, but only 37 out of 100 on whether staff felt the organization consistently held people accountable. The technology was ready. The people around it weren't.
What followed wasn't a bigger training deck. It was a year of weekly working sessions, monthly goals, and roughly 465 requests, each one treated as a small act of trust rather than a ticket to close.
At the center of it was Rachel Mazzaro, a nine-year Give Merit staffer who'd spent years quietly building her own spreadsheet systems, unnamed and unrecognized. When the new system launched, she became the person the whole organization leaned on. A year later, staff comments that once blamed "the system" were crediting her by name instead.
The numbers back it up. Staff confidence that the organization consistently held people accountable rose from 37 to 79 out of 100. Kuhu, once the sole keeper of institutional memory, now opens requests herself—something she'd never have done a year earlier.
There's a pattern worth sitting with: where trust in a system breaks down, people blame the software. Where trust takes hold, the conversation shifts from software to people. They stop blaming the software and start crediting the people who helped make it succeed.
Give Merit's story isn't really about Salesforce. It's about what happens when a technology partner shares accountability for outcomes—not simply delivering working software.
Curious what this could look like for your organization?
Every nonprofit's story is different, but the pattern holds: real change happens when a partner is co-accountable for the outcome, not just the software configuration. If you're wondering whether your team could have a Give Merit moment of its own, Matt would love to hear where you're starting from and talk through what your path forward might look like.
No pressure, no pitch deck. Just a conversation about what success could actually look like for your organization.
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